Google Voice Basics: About Google Voice

Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones — a phone number that is tied to you, not to a device or a location. Use Google Voice to simplify the way you use phones, make using voicemail as easy as email, customize your callers’ experience, and more.

Google Voice isn’t a phone service, but it lets you manage all of your phones. Google Voice works with mobile phones, desk phones, work phones, and VoIP lines. There’s nothing to download, upload, or install, and you don’t have to make or take calls using a computer.

Google Voice will let you define which phones ring, based on who’s calling, and even let you Listening on voicemail before answering the call. We use smart technology to route your calls. So, if you’re already on a Google Voice call, we’ll recognize it and use call waiting to reach you on the phone you’re on.

Features

Basic Features of Google Voice

Bad News…

Google voice not on iphone

Back in July Apple pulls Google Voice off iphone:
The long-awaited Google Voice application for the iPhone has been officially shot down by Apple.

There were a scattering of reports on Monday, and then a Google spokesperson confirmed it: “Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store. We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users–for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers.” Click here for the article

FCC looking into Google Voice

Google argues that it is not subject to the same laws because it’s a software company and because Google Voice doesn’t replace phone service; it still requires phone service to work properly. It addressed the inquiry in a blog post Friday.

“AT&T apparently now wants Web applications–from Skype to Google Voice–to be treated the same way as traditional phone services,” wrote Richard Whitt, Google’s Washington media and telecom counsel. “Their approach is what a former FCC chairman has called “regulatory capitalism,” the practice of using regulation to block or slow down innovation. And despite AT&T’s lobbying efforts, this issue has nothing to do with network neutrality or rural America. This is about outdated carrier compensation rules that are fundamentally broken and in need of repair by the FCC.”

So now it appears that the FCC will attempt to referee the matter. Google’s no stranger to federal authorities at the moment, with just about everything it does falling under the watchful eye of an administration that seems determined to examine dominant companies in the tech industry. Click here for the Article

But good news for Verizon Customers (Like Me)

Two Verizon Android phones coming in 2009

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10368458-265.html?tag=mncol;mlt_related

The Android devices that emerge from this partnership will have Google’s Android Market preinstalled on the phones, said John Stratton, executive vice president and chief marketing officer for Verizon Wireless parent company Verizon Communications.

The companies declined to name hardware partners for the initial devices, but Motorola and HTC have been rumored for months as the initial phone makers expected to work with Verizon. Beyond that, it sounds like Verizon and Google expect to release other devices, such as Netbooks or perhaps an ebook reader that will run on Verizon’s network.

Some nice possible phone that Verizon may use….